Sunday, April 27, 2008

Office Hours, Antioch Commencement, Green Pricing, Wendell Berry


(Picture: courtesy Dayton Daily News, is of graduating Antioch College student, India Davis)

Our next Village Council meeting is this coming Monday, 5th May, so I'll have a fuller report once I've seen the packet of materials. I will be having my normal office hours tomorrow (Mon, 4/28), 12-1 pm, Emporium.

We're planning to have a teleconference with the Antioch University Board of Trustees at some point in the next couple of weeks to discuss the ongoing issues around the planned closing of the College--please let me know what your concerns are, as villagers, and any ideas you have about how we should approach this conversation. (Particularly if there's any further news this week regarding negotiations).

Like many of you, I did attend the Antioch College 156th Commencement this weekend, and it was beautiful and inspiring--and infuriating that the beautiful work being done there is in such dire jeopardy. The youthful energy of the place is still alive, even if there aren't so many students as there were in its heyday--there's a non-toxic beauty to those students! And the art on campus was amazing, astonishing.

And, again, don't forget to sign up for Green Pricing! We have already well exceeded, in fact we've more than doubled, the national average of sign ups for Green Pricing (they average about 2.5% in markets where it's available). We're at about 6% right now; we're supposed to get 10% of all households before we can implement it. We believe we can get there, but we definitely need YOU and your family to participate!

Remember, you can download the form at our new EC blog--or just email me and I'll send you one, electronically.

Finally, I just read a beautiful, thought-provoking, philosophical, literary essay by Wendell Berry in this month's Harper's entitled, "Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits." Everyone should read it. Here's a snippet--

"To recover from our disease of limitlessness, we will have to give up the idea that we have a right to be godlike animals, that we are potentially omniscient and omnipotent, ready to discover 'the secret of the universe.' We will have to start over, with a different and much older premise: the naturalness and, for creatures of limited intelligence, the necessity, of limits. We must learn again to ask how we can make the most of what we are, what we have, what we have been given. If we always have a theoretically better substitute available from somebody or someplace else, we will never make the most of anything. It is hard to make the most of one's life. If we had two lives, we would not make much of either. Or as one of my best teachers said of people in general: 'They'll never be worth a damn as long as they've got two choices.'"


It's online here, for subscribers--
Or go to the library. Or borrow one from a friend.

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